One of the best and most conclusive tests of antisemitism among Israel’s many critics is whether or not they apply the same standards to others that they apply to the Jewish homeland. Virtually every time Israel responds to violence launched from Palestinian enclaves, we read and see stories damning it as “not proportional” or “callous” or ‘racist.”
But what about when Palestinians are responded to by other nations?
Writing in The Forward last year, Elizabeth Tusrkov published a very enlightening, and pretty conclusive examination of this question:
For the past two weeks, horrifying images of Palestinians being murdered have surfaced on social media. Jets have dropped bombs, sending flames and black smoke into the air, followed by helicopters dropping improvised and unguided barrel bombs. On the ground, in the besieged Palestinian camp, buildings collapsed burying civilians alive underneath them.
Those who have attempted to flee the camp have been arrested. No food or medicine has been allowed into the camp since July 2013. About 200 residents have starved to death or died due to lack of medicine. The airstrikes and shelling have not stopped for two weeks, preventing rescuers from retrieving the rotting corpses.
And yet, despite these horrors, no significant protests took place anywhere in the West or Arab world. The traditional champions of the Palestinian cause — those same people who have protested Israeli attacks on Gaza — have remained silent as the Palestinian Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus in Syria was shelled by Russian and Syrian air forces, while militias loyal to the Assad regime enforced a brutal siege.If there was a chorus of condmenation of these attacks, and lionization of the Palestinians as anti-imperialists, it must have escaped my attention. This Appeared Here
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